Corpse Flower Update

About ten days ago we told you about Spike, a titan arum flower set to bloom at the Chicago Botanic Garden. You may remember Spike as the giant colorful corpse flower known for its stench immediately after it blooms. In the time since we last wrote about this plant, scientists expected it to bloom and release that stench meant to attract pollinators within a few days of our post, except that it didn't happen. Spike never bloomed, and yesterday scientists manually opened the flower to see what was happening inside. You can read about it and see pictures from yesterday's event here. It was indeed a teachable moment and a good reminder, especially to our students performing experiments in our Biology and Chemistry lab classes, that sometimes, even if you do everything correctly, things don't turn out as planned or hoped. That's a mystery of science and nature and a reason why people have been fascinated with science and nature for centuries. The good news is that Spike may bloom again one day, and in the meantime, the Chicago Botanic Garden has other titan arum plants that may fascinate us in the future as well!